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Abstract In this paper, I explore how and to what extent transformations in scholarly research and publication have effected changes in scholarship itself. Taking my theoretical cues from media studies, I use the dual lenses of media displacement and media saturation theory to analyze the alteration in practice that has occurred as scholars shift from analog to digital forms of research and writing. We see that this shift was not itself binary but exists along a continuum. For instance, the digitization of primary and secondary sources promised to unlock new methods of digital research, but the often poor quality of optical character recognition impedes the application of those methods. Word processing promised to speed up scholarly production and, in some senses, succeeded but also managed to occlude the digital texts, making them harder to aggregate and repurpose. Web annotations aimed to fulfill the vision of a distributed web of critical commentary but the scale of the internet makes achieving such dreams hard to pull off. Digital tools for enumerative bibliography have largely automated the formulation of citations, though they have not yet broken with the form itself. Finally, digital publishing still relies, by and large, on interfaces that mimic their analog counterparts. In short, we find that digital tools and methods are not displacing the analog but supplementing them. Is this a sign of an ongoing and incomplete digital revolution or a stable and enduring scholarly synthesis?

Keywords Scientific Culture, Media Studies, Digitization, Librarianship, Text Processing, Digital Humanities Pedagogy